Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan by Setsu Shigematsu (review)

Scream from the Shadows is a historical analysis of the Japanese women’s liberation movement (ūman ribu) that breaks new terrain in the interdisciplinary field of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. First and foremost, this work is an important intervention into an intellectual enterprise frequently accused of being dominated by the Western experience. Second, Shigematsu’s innovative methodological approach excavates past narratives and extends them into the present. In doing so, she enables Japanese feminists to talk across different time periods, articulating their worldviews and reflecting upon their goals, tactics, and accomplishments in their own voices. Third, her analysis of this period in Japan’s past recovers and outlines a political philosophy that offers theoretical tools to contemporary feminist debates crossnationally. In referencing a broad range of literature and using an assembly of methodological tools from across the disciplines, Scream from the Shadows is interdisciplinary research work at its very best.

As gender studies programs continue a decades-long struggle to heed Chandra Monhanty’s challenge to be mindful of longstanding accusations of privileging European and American feminism and to incorporate voices from the so-called “Third World,”¹Scream from the Shadows uses the tools and vocabulary of this intellectual enterprise to claim center stage for the Japanese experience. Shigematsu describes Japan’s women’s liberation movement of the 1970s as “a particular incarnation of radical feminism, born from the cross-fertilization of genealogies of resistance both domestic and international” (p. xv). From the very beginning, she places the Japanese experience on equal footing and in conversation with feminists everywhere, making clear that it is not derivative of the Western experience. This work is a sharp and refreshing contrast to existing research that either views Japanese women as lagging behind feminist awakenings elsewhere or treats the case as singular.

Scream from the Shadows, as a guide to key writings from the heavily documented ūman ribu movement, embraces feminist standpoint theory’s push to privilege women’s worldviews in knowledge production. Shigematsu carefully attends to how the authors of key movement documents were socially situated in ways that shaped their philosophical commitments while offering a method of reading and interpreting these artifacts of the movement for contemporary usage. Shigematsu introduces us to iconic figures of the movement such as Tanaka Mitsu, controversial as much for what she said as for being the media’s chosen figurehead for the movement. Activists such as Mori Setsuko and Yonezu Tomoko worked alongside and struggled against Tanaka to articulate their views so as not to become defined by the movement’s most well-known figure. The documented tensions within the movement yield a rich and comprehensive record for later excavation.

In analyzing the archives of the movement and interviewing its activists, Shigematsu seeks to avoid “reproducing a developmental narrative” in order to “[excavate] the political meaning and relevance of the movement today” (p. xxvi). In doing so, she methodologically sidesteps social scientists’ reluctance to rely on informants’ recall of past events as a reliable data source by theorizing her concept of a translocational politics that disrupts existing hierarchies of knowledge production, time, and linguistic and national boundaries (p. xxiv). Shigematsu’s critical theorization of the movement’s archives and in-depth interviews converts the ūman ribu period into a continuous genealogy that is still being written in contemporary pursuits for transformative social change. In this way, the struggles and the lessons learned remain fresh and eminently relatable.

While the roots of ūman ribu are in the New Left movement of the 1960s, it broke away and also distinguished itself from other Japanese women’s movements that used the housewife identity as their glue. In questioning “the assumptions of the individual and validity of the logic of the law” (p. 29), ribu activists also highlighted the limitations of associating with dominant forms of liberal feminism developing in the West during...